Complex Meshuggah is metal with twists

May 17, 2003|By Rick Reger, Special to the Tribune.

While communing with dark, hobgoblin spirits in Sweden's limitless pine forests, five hirsute, brooding lads stumble upon a variant of heavy metal that's as complex as Fermat's Last Theorem and as aggressive as a rabid badger on PCP.

Although not widely known, the Swedish quintet Meshuggah has developed an underground renown over the last decade thanks to its knack for treating death-metal music not as satanic shock theater but as an avant-garde art form.

And at Meshuggah's Metro set Tuesday night, that unconventional approach was reflected in the near-capacity crowd, which seemed made up equally of punk rockers, traditional metal fans and progressive music freaks.

Clad all in black, vocalist Jens Kidman, guitarists Marten Hagstrom and Fredrik Thordendal, bassist Gustaf Hielm and utterly brilliant drummer Tomas Haake spent an hour and 15 minutes awing the crowd with a set of intricately constructed metal executed with daunting precision. But this wasn't the usual metal shtick of power chords and high-volume riffs; it was the sound of a glacier calving 8-ton blocks of ice in strict, unorthodox rhythm.

On songs such as "Stengah" and "Closed Eye Visuals," Meshuggah created dense sonic lattices by having drummer Haake, the three guitarists and vocalist Kidman each articulate riffs in distinct yet cleverly overlapping time signatures.

Other numbers, such as "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" and "Perpetual Black Second," found the quintet locked in unison hammering of labyrinthine riff-rhythms that seamlessly bifurcated into jagged cross-rhythms, straight 4/4 passages and then back to unison riffing. "Future Breed Machine" even opened into a spooky yet beautifully tonal section that Thordendal filled with glossy, glassy, Allan Holdsworth-style arpeggios.

If you can image Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" rhythmically updated by Elliott Carter and then performed as a heavy metal opus, you have some idea of the baleful, majestic complexity of Meshuggah's music. Perhaps the most mundane aspect of the performance was vocalist Kidman, who dispenses with melody and simply barks out lyrics in a rehearsed rhythmic counterpoint to what the rest of the band is playing.

Surprisingly, while Meshuggah favors dissonance of almost tectonic density, the band's performance was anything but cacophonous.

Even polyrhythmic etudes such as "Rational Gaze" and "Soul Burn" displayed an organic, aesthetically pleasing structure and richly, cleanly layered sound. And they were articulated with crisp, pinpoint precision and a telepathic interplay that could only have come from relentless practice.

In many ways, it's a shame that Meshuggah's audience will most likely be limited to the death metal milieu as the quintet's set unequivocally demonstrated that it's one of the most imaginative, creative and virtuoso ensembles on the planet.